The Review

All posts, comments andstatements made on IR are those of the authors only. Any disputes must be addressed to the writers, who are solely responsible for their posts, comments and statements. We reserve the right to deny or remove comments. Content may not be used without permission of the author.

Sunday, July 28, 2013

DiLeo: Revolutions in Judgment, Past and Present

By John F. Di Leo -

The President of the
United States is committed to supporting the rebels in Syria, in their effort
to overthrow the vicious dictator Bashir Assad. No one on earth –not his
people, not the authors of a dictionary, not his closest friends, would ever
argue the point. He is a vicious dictator, a malevolent cancer on the map of
the middle east.

So the American
President commits to sending American aid –guns and ammo, technology and
funding – to support the rebels trying to pull this vicious dictator off his perch.
But who are these rebels?

They are loosely
known as the Free Syria Army, a collection of militias that oppose Assad’s
alliance with Iran and support of Hezbollah. Sound good so far? Well, keep
listening. The FSA is essentially a collection of Muslim Brotherhood terror
bands, a coalition of Sunni muslim groups that want to replace the bloodthirsty
dominance of the middle east by Shi’ites with uncontested bloodthirsty
dominance by Sunnis. The rebels are the Morsi wing, the Bin Laden wing – a more
modern, more so-called religious version of the Saddam Hussein side of this
endless struggle.

So who should we
support? Assad has built his career on stirring up his forces to kill Jews,
Christians, and other muslims. The Syrian rebellion has built their careers on
stirring up their own protesters to kill Jews, Christians, and other muslims.
To these cretins, a male western journalist was put on earth to be beheaded; a
female western journalist was put on earth to be raped. And these journalists’
home country was put on earth to fund their efforts, either by purchasing
petroleum or by donating money and equipment outright. The West is a piggy bank
to be raided, until it can be completely taken over as part of the eventual
caliphate.

How do we choose
between them? When a foreign country is in revolution, the Western press
displays videos on the TV, prints pictures on the front page, reports radio
updates every hour on the hour. Another five, another ten, another thirty,
another hundred, were massacred today by {fill in the blank: gunfire, bombs,
riot control}. Surely we must choose a side; the violence is too severe to sit
by and tolerate. We must figure out who the good guys are, and support them,
before it’s too late.

Every
Revolution is Different

Before we choose
sides in the revolts of today, let’s look back in time at two of the world’s
most famous revolutions, from over two centuries ago, products of The
Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment
saw many revolutions, but only two are incredibly memorable, locked into our
consciousness as key moments in human history: The American War of
Independence, known to its supporters as “The Glorious Cause,” and The French
Revolution.

Though just over a
decade apart, with even a few major leaders in common, the former was a
stirring success, while the latter has gone down in history as an errant path,
a descent into hell for one of the most ghastly decades in human history.

Why did ours succeed
and theirs turn into such a horrific bloodbath?

There are many
reasons, but most can be summed up concisely, and they may be instructive as we
attempt to evaluate other revolutions.

1) Ours
was based on a desire for freedom; theirs was based on a desire for
revenge.

The American
colonists were proud to be Englishmen –specifically, Englishmen with the
protections of the Magna Carta and its successor documents, Englishmen with
great distance from central government, Englishmen with almost unlimited opportunity
in a wide-open country of abundant natural resources. It was only as King
George III worked to curtail these freedoms and opportunities that the American
colonists rebelled.

By contrast, the
French revolutionaries – the mobs who rose to rebel (at least, after
overthrowing the reasonable early leaders like the Marquis de Lafayette) were
in it for revenge. Their speechmakers harangued the crowds about taking back
the wealth from the upper classes, taking back the power from the nobility,
taking back the authority from king and church. They wanted revenge. Now, it’s
not fair to say that people who have been wronged don’t deserve revenge;
sometimes they do. But it cannot be the principle motivating factor. Even two
centuries later, that motivator remains a strong element of many a rebel, of
many a political party, not just in France, but across the Pond, here in the
USA, as well, as we see from the Occupy movement of recent years, for example.

But not then.
Then, the difference between wanting to regain and preserve the rights of
Englishmen, vs. wanting to pull down everyone higher up in France, was the key
distinction that shines forth in any side-by-side analysis of the two
revolutions. The one was honorable, proud, decent. The other was hateful,
jealous, uninspired.

2) Ours was
rooted in religious observance; theirs was rooted in hatred of religion and of
God Himself.

The Founding
Fathers of the United States arrived from Europe, for the most part, as a
melting pot of Christian denominations. Calvinists and Lutherans, Quakers
and Pilgrims, even a couple of Catholics and Jews - most came to these shores
at least partially because their particular denomination wasn’t welcome at
home. Catholics in Anglican England, Protestants in Catholic France,
there were so many denominations that just didn’t fit in, back home in Europe,
but they would be welcome here.

The American
people were therefore very pro-religion, but tended to be opposed to the idea
of an establishment of religion – the taxpayer-funding and government-mandating
of any specific denomination. They had seen government mandates go wrong,
veering into persecution, so they valued their freedom. Not a freedom
from religion, by any means, but a freedom in favor of religion, supporting the
choice of denomination.

The French, by
contrast, had never left the country to seek more welcoming shores; they were
still in the homeland of their ancestors, and many of the revolutionaries had a
visceral hatred for the established Catholic Church, particularly with its
well-known alliance with the crown, especially during the recent Kings, Louis
XIII through XVI. It might be difficult indeed to be raised a pauper in
18th century France and not have a chip on the shoulder about
the Church; there was plenty of evidence to support such prejudice.

The goals of these
two brands of rebels, therefore, could hardly have been more different, where
religion was concerned. The Americans valued their many denominations and
wanted them to remain strong; the French largely hated their clerical class,
and, fairly or unfairly, wanted to pull them down. Jealousy and a desire
for revenge motivated the French in the area of religion as well.

3) An absolute
contrast in governmental theory.

While the French
revolutionaries intended to replace the leaders of an omnipotent government
with their own new leaders of an even more omnipotent government, ours was
based on a recognition of the dangers of all government, and a commitment to
keep government highly limited, no matter who was in charge of it.

The American
revolutionaries, for the most part, were already statesmen, elected to colonial
legislatures from Georgia to New England, having had years, decades, whole
careers, in which to contemplate political theory. The Americans cut
their political teeth in Boston, in Williamsburg, in Annapolis, in Providence…
they respected freedom, and understood what kinds of governmental powers – even
in the hands of well-intentioned people – could impinge on the liberty of the citizens.
They had no desire to raise up one of their own to replace George III as their
leader; they desired only a nation that would preserve citizens’ liberties and
never, never empower a George III again.

The French had no
such experience. Except for a small percentage of the rebels, such as the
quickly marginalized Lafayette and the corrupt Talleyrand, the French had been
shut out of government for much of a century. Thousands of rebels sought
greater power without having learned the skill in lesser branches, without
having spent years debating legislation and studying the philosophy of
governance. The majority, particularly after the failure of the first
legislature and the rise of the Terror, had so little experience that only
ever-more-gripping violence could hold sufficient appeal to retain their
newfound raw power.

4) Behavior off
the Battlefield.

The French leaders
celebrated violence and mayhem in the streets, and bloodthirsty attacks on
civilians and politicians. By contrast, America’s Glorious Cause was led by
peaceful statesmen who strove continuously to restrain the
violent impulses of the civilian patriots, and to restrict our bloodshed to the
battlefield.

This point truly
cannot be stressed enough. The examples we find in the history books are
plentiful and profound. While the French convinced children to turn in
their parents, and spouses to turn in their spouses to be executed, the
American leaders did their level best to keep the civilian population peaceful
and tolerant.

George Washington,
for example, honorably refused pleas to just confiscate food from farmers for
his army; he negotiated with farmers and often paid out of his own pocket, to
ensure that this new nation would not be born in an unnecessary abuse of the public
by their government.

And consider the
time (on May 10, 1775) that a lynch mob attempted to grab college president
Myles Cooper to hang him for being a loyalist on a patriot campus. Young
patriot Alexander Hamilton, then just a college student (though he had
anonymously sparred with his loyalist dean in the local press), delivered a
famous and long speech to the crowd – about the need for our revolution to be
moral and decent – giving his friends enough time to save Cooper's life…again,
in order that our new nation would not be born in needless civilian bloodshed.

Stories such as
these fill the accounts of this era. Certainly, there were abuses
of loyalists here, just as there were decent people in the French
revolution. But both such cases were the exception in their respective
circumstances. The effort in America was to create a nation of
respect, honor, peace and decency; the effort in France was to destroy, to
rule, to dominate. Americans wanted liberty and prosperity to flow like a
river; all that the French revolutionaries produced were rivers of blood.

Modern Times in
the Middle East

Today, we are
faced with a region at war with itself. The arab world is aflame, as
Sunnis attack Shi’ites, as rulers attack their people, as people rebel against
their rulers.

There are
revolutions and tumult in many places, but most significantly in Egypt and
Syria, where the terribly misnamed Arab Spring of 2011 gave birth to countless
new theaters of conflict

The Egyptian
experiment with a 2011 revolutionary government may in fact be over at
last. The Muslim Brotherhood’s vicious Mohamed Morsi presided over a
lawless, violent nation. Prior dictators Mubarek and Sadat had at least
managed to keep the society safe enough for tourism, some commerce, the
practice of Christianity by the nation’s Copts (who, by the way, precede the
muslims in Egypt by six hundred years).

Under the rebels’
favorite, Morsi, the rabble were given carte blanche to attack Coptic churches,
to assault westerners, to scare away the tourism that had often been the only
source of foreign cash for much of their poor country. The experiment has
been proven to be a disaster, and the army has taken over, in a late attempt to
undo some of the damage these revolutionaries have done.

So what of Syria
now, having seen the experiment of Egypt end in smoke and poverty and blood?

Looking at Egypt,
comparing their revolutionaries to the telltale signs of the USA-vs.-France
contrasts above, it is simple, in hindsight at least, to see that their
revolutionaries were likely to go down the path of the French. They were
bound to become lawless, destructive, violent… all the signs were there.

Syria has a bigger
difference in the leadership; Assad has been far worse, both to his own people
and to his neighbors, than Mubarek was. So a case can certainly be made
that to see Assad removed from the world scene would indeed be a blessing.

But in government
and in foreign affairs, there is never so simple a choice. We cannot look
only at the removal of the leader and his government; we must look at what will
replace it. And there is no doubt that the Free Syria Army is a Muslim
Brotherhood ally that has already shared power, weapons, and intelligence with
Al Qaeda and other regional and global terrorist organizations. They share
motivations, bloodlust, autocratic intent, and warped pseudo-religious hatred
with their forerunners in France and their cousins in Egypt.

If we support the
FSA, we support Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. If we support
the FSA, our American tax dollars and foreign policy backing will be used to
directly kill Christians and Jews, and to further destabilize the region.

But there is a
bright side: We are not forced to choose between them. We do not have to
decide between supporting Assad and supporting the rebels. There is
no law that says we must arm either side; we can declare “a pox on both their
houses” and stay out of it.

In fact, unless
Congress specifically directs action through a declaration of war, we MUST stay
out of it. The President’s offer of support to the Muslim Brotherhood’s and Al
Qaeda’s forces in Syria are illegal unless Congress authorizes it. If he
abuses his office by illegally directing American funds to such terrorist
organizations, it would be an impeachable offence. The United States is a
bankrupt nation anyway; we cannot afford to blow up billions of dollars we
don’t have in a foreign nation where there is no side worthy of our support.

There are two
hundred countries on this earth, and too many are in trouble at any given point
in time for us to help them all out. When the situation is as sad
as this one, we have an obligation to, first of all, do no harm. We must
stay out of it, praying for the poor innocent victims of the monsters on each
side, certainly… but we must not tie our wagon to either horse.

As evil as both
sides are in Syria today, we have no business giving the people of the world
the idea that the beacon of freedom on earth would ever consciously identify
with either of these bands of monsters.

Copyright 2013
John F. Di Leo

John F. Di Leo
is a Chicago-based Customs broker and international trade compliance
trainer. His columns are found regularly in Illinois Review.

Permission is
hereby granted to forward freely, provided it is uncut and the byline and IR
URL are included. Follow John F. Di Leo on Facebook or LinkedIn, or on
Twitter at @johnfdileo.

Comments

DiLeo: Revolutions in Judgment, Past and Present

By John F. Di Leo -

The President of the
United States is committed to supporting the rebels in Syria, in their effort
to overthrow the vicious dictator Bashir Assad. No one on earth –not his
people, not the authors of a dictionary, not his closest friends, would ever
argue the point. He is a vicious dictator, a malevolent cancer on the map of
the middle east.

So the American
President commits to sending American aid –guns and ammo, technology and
funding – to support the rebels trying to pull this vicious dictator off his perch.
But who are these rebels?

They are loosely
known as the Free Syria Army, a collection of militias that oppose Assad’s
alliance with Iran and support of Hezbollah. Sound good so far? Well, keep
listening. The FSA is essentially a collection of Muslim Brotherhood terror
bands, a coalition of Sunni muslim groups that want to replace the bloodthirsty
dominance of the middle east by Shi’ites with uncontested bloodthirsty
dominance by Sunnis. The rebels are the Morsi wing, the Bin Laden wing – a more
modern, more so-called religious version of the Saddam Hussein side of this
endless struggle.